This year, I’ve decided to try something new with my music. I’m going to endeavour to produce something each week, and put it up here for public consumption. The idea is that it’ll force me to write more music. Bear in mind that I can’t guarantee that what I put up will be any good! 
So, to kick it all off, here’s a track I wrote in not very much time, entitled “The subtle monkey”. (Track nomenclature has never been one of my strong points.) Let me know what you think!
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(Download)
The Subtle Monkey by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
My wife and I have just finished our Christmas carols album, “Emmanuel: God with us”. On it, you’ll find brand new orchestral arrangements of ten great carols.
It’s available for digital download now at 
. You can listen to each of the tracks in full above, and decide whether or not you want to help support poor starving musicians like ourselves.
Each track is going for around $1 (or more, if you’re so inclined!), and you can pick up the whole album for $5 or more. You can also get your hands on a physical CD if you like — just let me know!
Continuing my HTML5 and canvas experiments, I’ve put together a generative music system. Essentially, a series of particles move across a field, occasionally triggering sounds — the sound triggered depends on their location in the field.
There is, of course, a little bit more to it than that. Under the hood, I’ve got a series of HTML5 Audio objects that are used to provide polyphonic audio using a simple round-robin algorithm (I encoded the audio in OGG, so you’ll need to use an OGG-friendly browser, like Firefox). The particles are much simpler than those in my previous canvas dalliance, in that they don’t swarm, and their motion is more linear.
About a month ago, I was playing around on the piano, and I came up with a fragment of melody that I couldn’t get out of my head. I played with it, twisting it around, pushing it in different directions, seeing what I could do with it. Ultimately, I turned it into a full piece of music, and this is the result.
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Like this track? Buy it at thesixtyone, and help feed an impoverished (well, not really) programmer.
You can also listen to one of the (early) improvisations I played on this theme by downloading the recording I made on my phone here.
